Reflections on generosity, philanthropy and social change

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Amy Ahearn on the +Acumen team has built more than 20 online courses, and she describes Angela Duckworth’s new course as “the first course I’ve ever recommended to my mom, who has been an elementary school teacher for the past 30 years.”

I’ve taken Angela’s course and it is excellent: clear, motivating, and actionable. For all of us working on long-haul problems of social change, we probably know we need to be more gritty but we might not know exactly how to do that.

So, if you’ve ever struggled to find the passions that animate you, if you’d be interested in creating a 4-step plan that will help you master a new “hard thing,” if you’d like tips on how to develop a growth mindset by reframing challenges, or if you’d just like to understand the connection between optimism and grit, this course is for you.

And here’s a bonus: because we believe in and love teachers so much, +Acumen is giving an 82% discount on Angela’s course to educators until July 7th.

That’s right.

Anyone working in education can get the course, which normally sells for $100, for just $18 by using the coupon code TEACHERSROCK.

Like this:

So much of how we experience each other bounces off everything that is left unsaid.

Expectations about how good the movie would be.

Expectations about what was meant when you were told “the meeting will start at 10:00.”

Expectations about how we will dress.

Expectations about what it means to do this job.

Expectations about what it means to work for you.

Expectations about who gets to have good ideas.

Expectations about who gets to say yes, and no.

Expectations about who gets to speak when.

Expectations about how, and how much, to agree and disagree.

Expectations about where we do our best work.

Expectations about whether showing up in person matters.

Expectations about how much care we put into saying “thank you.”

Expectations about what it means to listen, and the relative importance of listening and speaking.

Expectations about how a President is supposed to act.

Expectations about who can and cannot leave the office first.

Expectations about what silence means (in a meeting, when I don’t hear back from you).

Expectations about what you mean when you say “I’ll take it from here.”

It turns out that most of how we experience in the world comes from sense-making, and sense-making is a comparison between what happened and the sum total of everyone’s unspoken expectations.

Think for a moment about what this means if you’re working across…anything really: geography, culture, class, religion, age, gender, or even just two groups within the same organization.

More often than not, misunderstandings come from forgetting how different each of our expectations are, and from the mental shortcuts we all take as we fill in blanks (“what did that really mean?”) based all of our unconscious biases.

Like this:

Always be sniffing for clues that you are doing real and important work.

A nice cocktail to look out for is the mixture of fear that “this might be a total waste of time” mingling with moments (minutes, maybe hours) flying by because you are totally engrossed in something.

This fear you’re feeling comes because there aren’t clear external markers for what you’re working on, or because some people you trust are telling you that this won’t work, or because you can sense that you’re further out on a limb than you ever have been before.

When this sort of nagging doubt comes together with a project that completely engrosses you, one that sometimes grabs you and won’t let go because you’re so in sync with the work…that’s a great time to keep going for it.

That kind of synchronicity doesn’t come along often, and the fear and doubt you’re feeling is the worry that you might do something big and important.

You might. Which means that when you pull it off, you won’t be able to walk away from it.

That’s scary too. But it’s just this kind of work that we need from you.

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I was speaking to an impact investor recently, and he was saying that investment decisions are ultimately based on an intuitive sense the investor has about the company: the deal, the team, the market opportunity. And shouldn’t we just use our intuition to assess impact?

This is the most common unspoken premise used by impact investors to justify not collecting impact data.

So, where does this intuition come from? And is there such a thing as good and bad impact intuition?

Intuition is subconscious pattern recognition. And patterns are the sum total of the information we’ve taken in. If that information, and our ability to understand and process it, is of high quality, then we develop good intuition. If not, not.

A good investor is awash in quantitative and qualitative data that inform her investment intuition. For example, on the quantitative side, she’ll know what she expected gross margins to be, the predicted length of a company’s working capital cycle, and how many years she forecasted it would take for the company to get to profitability.

But that original financial model will have a very short shelf life: after the investment, she’ll get reams of data to show whether her predictions were right or wrong.

But in the world of impact, she’ll handle things differently.

She’ll look at research and benchmarks to develop a thesis. And she’ll stop there and multiply products sold by those benchmarks [e.g. 10 lights sold * X predicted impact/light = 10x impact].

This is like creating a pre-investment financial model of a company and then, two years later, when asked how the company is performing, using the model’s original variables to answer that question.

Not only would this answer not be any good, but her impact intuition would never improve.

Why do we accept the idea that we can understand the impact we are creating in people’s lives by looking at comparables? Why do we nod when told that it’s hard to get better data (it’s not)? How can we say that “we know impact when we see it” if we don’t gather data to understand actual performance?

The only explanation is this: we are not the people whose lives are, or are not, improved by a given intervention; we are not personally affected by a positive or negative ROI on a “better” solution; and the difference between potential and actual impact doesn’t land on our doorstep, or in our pocketbooks, or in our child’s cough or the quality of the education he receives.

The only way we’ll create better impact intuition is if we apply ourselves seriously to the question of learning what does and doesn’t improve people’s lives.

Like this:

Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, at 6:30pm Eastern Time, I’ll be participating in the third in a series of Acumen Debates hosted by EY. The Debates are a fun format that create a livelier conversation than your typical panel. And the good news is that we’re livestreaming the event, so even if you can make it you can tune in on Facebook.

The debate topic is: Do impact investors need to compromise between financial and social returns?

I’ll be arguing, along with Debra Schwartz from the MacArthur Foundation, that there are many cases where compromises can and should be made. We will be debating against Greg Shell from Bain Double Impact and Hilary Irby from Morgan Stanley’s Investing with Impact Initiative, in a conversation moderated by EY’s Jon Shepard.

While I won’t tip my hand and share the points I plan to make tomorrow night, I do have one hope for the conversation, and for our sector as a whole. I hope we can all agree that, irrespective of the financial returns they can generate, if someone is going to be a truly great impact investor, they have to be passionate about impact.

This may sound like a truism, so let me explain by way of example. I read Fred Wilson’s blog every day, and the posts that make me smile the most are the ones in which he geeks out about technology: when he switches from iOS back to Android, or talks about the various wireless speakers he’s fidgeting with at home, or wades into conversations about Bitcoin and the blockchain. It’s apparent to anyone reading that Fred loves technology. It fascinates him. It’s what he’s passionate about. And I’m sure he can’t help but learn about the latest gadgets, all the time.

In the same vein, to be an “impact” investor (and putting aside if anyone still likes that term, which no one seems to these days), I would hope we’d be passionate about impact. And by “impact” I mean actual, tangible changes in people’s lives or in the environment. This passion would manifest, like Fred’s, in a deep, insatiable curiosity about what makes people’s lives better, and what leverage points might exist to make large-scale, lasting change. It would come across as profound attention being paid to improvements that happen in the real world, with all other indicators – including financial returns, which very well could be high – simply seen as means to an end.

These days, when I take part in and listen to conversations in our sector, I hear the most passion about funds, about returns, about fund structures, and about capital flows. It’s striking how comfortable we are talking about money. I’m looking forward to more days in which the passion we express, the deep curiosity we manifest, the conversations we can’t stop having, start and end with people, with communities, with what constrains and enables their lives.